All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies,
one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better
language; and every chapter must be so translated ... As therefore the
bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon
the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more
me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness ... No man is an
island, entire of itself ... any man's death diminishes me, because
I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the
bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

John Donne (1572-1631), from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,
'Meditation XVII'.

INTRODUCTION

The idea of the island as a metaphor has for many centuries
provided an enduring focus for literature and art. It has been used in a
range of ways-as a signifier of isolation, of loneliness, of being cut
off from a broader community, and at other times as a microcosm of wider
society, or again as a potentially perfect creation of community-as a
utopia. In other ways, islands have also been used as sites from which
to describe dystopias, places that breed cultures premised on conditions
of oppression, deprivation and fear.

In any consideration of the impact of islands on our collective
literary or metaphorical consciousness in the West, it is difficult not
to start with John Donne, whose Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions,
'Meditation XVII,' has proved to be an ongoing inspiration for
so many writers and thinkers. Yet in this age of scepticism, where
we're all so inured to quotations, it seems almost corny to quote
Donne; all the more so in relation to a small sand island off the coast
of Brisbane. And given that the world-view of Donne's time accepted
myth and metaphor as valid means towards searching for ways of
understanding the world, the potential of invoking Donne seems all the
more bankrupt.

We live in times that understand the meaning of bankruptcy in an
acute but perhaps narrowly focused way. The shock of the global
financial collapse has also given rise to questions about whether we
might be at the end of a significant phase of history, one that could be
described as a post-enlightenment era. Even so, the enlightenment values
that emphasise the importance of rationalism and quantifiable evidence
have not yet been coaxed into re-admitting other methodologies that
might include mythology and allegory, or even the creative imagination,
as bedfellows that may be equally helpful means in attempts to
'make sense' of the world.

In terms of empirical values alone, Peel Island is remarkable for a
number of reasons (1)-it survives as the only material evidence of
enforced incarceration by the Australian Government for sufferers of
Hansen's disease, better known as leprosy. Peel was established as
a lazaret in 1907 (remaining open until 1959), and prior to this many of
the Moreton Bay islands had also been annexed to house
'others' who did not fit governmental ideals of a healthy,
well-controlled society. Inebriates, the old and infirm, paupers and the
"badly disabled" (2) had also been removed from general
society on the mainland to segregated colonies on the smaller islands
off the coast in Moreton Bay, and in 1874 they were removed from the
town of Dunwich on Stradbroke Island to the smaller island of Peel.

The idea of taking unsavoury persons and annexing them offshore had
been, of course, part of Britain's plan in colonising Australia; it
provided a model for incarceration that has endured in this country up
until the present. And Britain has also been conscious of her status as
an island, separate from the rest of Europe. Donne's own insular
speculations had been influenced by those of Thomas More, whose Utopia,
written in 1515, was a critique of British society that made a plea for
social interdependence. It was the singular lack of social
interdependence in Britain and the rest of Europe during More's
time that led him to write his book, influencing later Renaissance
writers such as Donne. However, More's imaginary Utopia was not an
idealisation of a separate, self-sustaining island. Rather, it was a
proposition that questioned the character of the
'civilisation' he knew to be riddled with corruption, deceit
and expediency.

Donne's devotional tract emphasises the necessity of all men
to feel conjoined to a greater social body. It is also an appeal to
consider the continuities of our own communities with the communities of
the past as much as it is about those who share time as well as space.
It's an appeal that challenges the finality of death as a barrier
against a sense of community that can transcend time. Donne's
'Meditation' interprets time as a continuum-as a single
chapter that is translated and re-translated according to changes in the
social and cultural context. In this sense history is something to be
understood and re-invested, and so in turn it is possible to interpret
the series of residencies that took place on Peel Island last year as
one of those ongoing chapters of the re-translation of its history.

The following is a series of stories told to me by a group of
artist-students, each of whom took part in a residency program at Peel
Island during 2008. The residency was established in collaboration with
Roland Dowling of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who had
been introduced to me by Rhonda Bryce and members of the organisation
Friends of Peel Island (FOPI)-a group of people who, for various reasons
including the personal and historical, remain committed to preserving
Peel Island as a site that bears evidence of its former existence as a
leper colony.

In the discussions and site visit that followed, it became clear
that Peel would prove to be an ideal place for artists and art students
to explore ideas about a sense of place through the island's
history and its environment. The place itself was compelling enough; the
environmental beauty of the island would have been sufficiently
seductive to lure anyone to consider it the perfect place for a short
residency; and the fact that large tracts of it are out of bounds
without the authority of the EPA made it seem even more appealing:
almost like a personal retreat.

But it is the legacy of the histories associated with the island
that make this appeal all the more complex and compelling-its former
role as a lazaret just off the coast of Brisbane seemed to be shrouded
in myths and conjecture. Somehow the very idea of leprosy seems to be
particularly un-Queensland; it's a word that still holds
associations with biblical or medieval times, with images of the
afflicted wrapped in filthy rags mournfully ringing a bell to warn
everyone off. Such apparitions seemed oddly out of synch with the
pristine white sands and (almost) pristine sea of a typical Queensland
island. But the surface sheen of "beautiful one day, perfect the
next" (3) glosses over a wealth of contradictions and complexities,
for much of Queensland's history-like much of Australia's in
general-has been the subject of wilful amnesia, and even just a little
digging often unearths a rich loam of surprising, frequently alarming
stories.

Another factor made the argument for the potential of this
residency particularly persuasive--there was something extraordinary in
the devotion of those people who had taken on the role of keeping the
island's history alive. You couldn't help but be struck by
their commitment to making sure the place would survive as a site that
could 'speak' about so many complex issues that continue as
part of Australian society today. Even the briefest visit to the site
makes evident the devotion and care that has been exercised to hold off
the eventual disappearance of the former lazaret.

Australia doesn't have many 'ruins' as such. The
first invaders made a big mistake when they went looking for landmarks
and monuments as markers of a sophisticated culture. For the level of
sophistication of the cultures they found can be assessed by the ongoing
refusal to impose cultural artefacts and practices on the country.
Rather, what we now recognise are cultures that are all the more
remarkable for working with the country; and part of the legacy of that
custodianship lies in the ecological diversity that had been maintained
for over 30,000 years-a diversity that has become threatened with the
impact of less sympathetic practices of land management. The long
continuous knowledge-base of indigenous peoples has been passed on from
generation to generation through the need for ritual and storytelling
and the honouring of shared symbolic orders and value systems.

Although indigenous cultures in Australia are diverse, they each
value the importance of bringing history--or the past--into the present
through processes of physical embodiment. Another way of saying this is
that they value the need to 'press the flesh'--to celebrate
together--to continually re-enact those rituals and performances central
to their culture, and to re-invent them into new forms.

Other cultures have attempted to embody this need for the whole
community to be present in order to remember specific events in
particular places by erecting monuments. These monuments are often
established by official bodies, and seem to be utilised as a substitute
for those acts whereby groups of people get together and 'call up
the past into the present' by 're-membering' together.
This word, re-membering, has a physicality to it--as if the act involves
a bringing together of different parts of the body; in particular
there's a sense of reconnection of the limbs to the body--of a kind
of re-joining that would make that body active. It recalls the early
self-understanding of the Christian Church, where the congregation is
literally 'the body of the church.' That is, it's not the
building itself but the people in it that made up the idea of the
church. So this idea of a group of people getting together to re-member
makes the process quite an organic thing; every time the past is called
up into the present new relationships are potentially possible.

This is a process that gives the past 'more teeth,'
because people actually learn to recognise the continuities and
contingencies of aspects of the past in their daily lives. It's
therefore a process that makes the past a little dangerous; when people
recall the past together, the sense of community, and of belonging to a
place, is strengthened. And that in turn gives people the power not only
to learn from the mistakes of the past, but also to draw emotional and
imaginative sustenance from the events of the past.

In Australia, we can readily visit the various rock art sites and
the bora rings and important landmarks from Uluru to the islands of
Moreton Bay, but the culture of those places comes alive most for us
when the custodians of these sites, those who have the cultural
authority, can pass appropriate information down to us. It is then that
the sites come alive. It is during such encounters that the continuum
between place and the people responsible for caring for that place
becomes most meaningful.

And it's the same when those sites have non-indigenous
histories--when we learn what went on before, we can have a much richer
understanding of some of the tendencies and traits of our contemporary
world. So the value of a place like Peel Island lies in its ability to
give up some of the wisps and shards of memories about what it once was,
and what it represents, and how its existence affected the lives of
those who were forcibly incarcerated there. And how, in turn, their
families were affected. And, in turn again, how we today become affected
by the legacies of that past.

The members of the EPA and FOPI who have worked as custodians of
Peel for some time realise all this. They have curated and coordinated
and collected material, from which activity it is possible to bring the
island's history into the future with a single-minded dedication.
And they've involved a large number of other communities, too-the
families of those who spent time on Peel, historians, politicians, the
denizens of Moreton Bay, the curious, and now ... members of an art
college.

If this project is to be of real value, the time and resources
offered generously by members of the EPA for artist-students to stay for
a short residency on Peel should ideally cast light on the ways in which
the history of such a place remains significant today. The following
stories are not offered as an analysis--the time since the residencies
occurred is much too short for that. And they are not meant as
history--the history of Peel has been well documented in Peter
Ludlow's book Peel Island: Paradise or Prison? (4) and The Leper
Shall Dwell Alone: Peel Island Lazaret Conservation Plan, by Thom Blake
and Robert Riddel. (5) Rather, they are presented to accompany a body of
visual art that has resulted from these residencies, as a background
context that does not seek to explain the work but that might sit
parallel with the visual works and extend them in some way.

Even at this stage of development of the residency program, it is
possible to ascertain some overlaps and synergies that run through the
experiences of individual participants. One of these lies in the fact
that their experience of the island, and with it, their deeper
understanding of its history, seems to have given some of the students
insight into previously unearthed aspects of their own lives. This may
be particularly true for filmmaker Teone Reinthal, who drew on her own
experience as a thalidomide-affected person to create a deeper empathy
with the story of patients who had been incarcerated there. Before her
Peel residency, Teone had worked mainly though the matter-of-fact
distancing necessary for documentary work; but the series she made after
her time there was marked by a more poetic present.

And for Natasha Cordasic, a growing understanding of the kind of
prejudices that forced 'others' into outposts of
rehabilitation in the past triggered her own childhood memories of being
'different.' She used these experiences of alienation to
produce a number of works that go deep into her own family and cultural
history in order to search for a contemporary agency that can join past
to present and culture to culture.

The sense of the mistakes of the past being echoed in the present
is especially evocative in the work of Dacchi Dang, whose experience in
refugee camps haunted his time on Peel. However, the works he has
produced are sympathetic and generous, and seem to call for ways of
listening to the shards of material evidence we have left there that
will allow a stronger recognition of what might be possible.

The demands of formal concerns and of materials and skills are
paramount for all visual artists, and for some residents these
constraints have interacted fruitfully with the subject matter of their
work. This is true of both Miles Hall and Rikizo Nishina, whose works
are as poetic as they are aesthetically inclined. However, their
accounts also suggest that during their residencies the formal concerns
of each artist also found ways of morphing into metaphorical potential;
Miles speaks of 'containment' and the potential
'liberation' of the eye or imagination, and Rikizo's
works seem to whisper about the power of the unseen in an aesthetic that
draws as much from the culture of his native Japan as it does from the
Australian landscape by which he is inspired.

The island's potential to evoke both seduction and repulsion
has been remarked on in the writing of both Peter Ludlow and Thom Blake
and Robert Riddel. Artist Jennie Jackson continues this theme in
photographic works that are as disquieting as they are mesmerising.
Jennie creates what she describes as 'imagined landscapes' by
technological means, and invokes a 'de-natured, impossible
nature' to suggest ideas about control and confinement that have
such a strong legacy on Peel Island.

Other accounts underscore the value of the residency as an
opportunity to spend extended periods of intimate time with fellow
artists and with the members of the EPA who were present to assist
residents. In Miles Hall's words, "the EPA guys were
fantastic--their attentiveness and the way they were just there for
us--telling us about the history of the place and filling us in with
some of the history of the other islands nearby really added substance
to the experience."

The accounts of Eric Rossi and Moe Louanjli highlight some of the
lighter aspects of the residency and remind us of how valuable the
resources of extended, uninterrupted time and relative solitude can be.
These accounts highlight the contradictions of Peel Island's
history, where imposed solitude was a curse sometimes worse than the
affliction the patients had to endure. In his work, Jim Waller uses the
island as an almost ideal metaphor for a post-modern dystopia, and
explores this notion through drawings and paintings that evoke the
complex and often contradictory overlays of historical and contemporary
experiences of place.

It is possible to see all these residencies as a continuation of
various aspects of Peel's legacy. One of its characteristics as a
lazaret was the unusually international mix of its inhabitants;
certainly a strong sense of internationalism is echoed in the cultural
mix of artists who have attended the residency so far, and each has
brought his or her rich and diverse experiences to bear on the totality
of aesthetic responses to the island and its history.

Another continuing aspect is the experience of living on the island
as simultaneously one of attraction and repulsion. Where the solitude
and peacefulness offered by the romantic idea of islands is promised as
an all-too-rare-luxury--a place where time can be enjoyed slowly and
experiences can be reflective-imposed solitude metamorphoses into
isolation, segregation and penance. The fact that those suffering
Hansen's Disease were removed from their families and communities
and forced by the government to live in a segregated compound brings
home both the fragility and value of feeling part of a community and the
times into which one is born.

And, perhaps predictably, there has been a strong appeal to the
'haunted' aspect of the environment at Peel. This is not
unusual within representations of Australian landscape--the "weird
melancholy" invoked by the writer Marcus Clarke (6) to define the
poetry of Adam Lindsay Gordon has been frequently cited in descriptions
of European painting from the early colonial period onwards. The belief
that indigenous peoples would 'die out' has been identified by
art historians and critics as underlying the pervasive, mournful spirit
in representations of place in Australia. However, even today, alongside
recognition and celebration of the fact that indigenous cultures have
not only survived but have created some of this country's most
dynamic and influential contemporary cultural forms, the tendency to
visualise the Australian landscape as unsettling, morose or strangely
haunted persists in contemporary visual arts, film and literature. And
it is especially true when artists seek out a sense of continuity with
the past.

Certainly part of Peel's historical legacy lies in the
tangible evidence of the failure of government to deal with
'difference.' (7) And although it can be argued that, in part,
the island's role as a lazaret was born of governmental attempts to
protect its citizens from contamination, the entire enterprise was
nevertheless marked by the blindness and stupidity of uninformed fears.
The works of so many of these artist-students produced as a result of
their experiences on Peel Island reflect sadness, or disappointment, or
at times wry amusement at the blindness of such fears, and in so doing
reinforce Peel's role as a reminder of the outcome of attitudes and
tendencies that still continue through similar processes today; evidence
that its role as an allegorical site may not yet be exhausted.

However, there is another very strange conundrum at play here: it
involves the possibility that any reconsideration of the mythical
potential of islands at this particular point of history may seem like
an about-face. For it was on the shorelines of such islands in the
Pacific Ocean that any lingering belief in the veracity of myths and
metaphors as valid means for understanding the world were abandoned in
favour of empiricism.

In his book Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias of
the Great Southern Land, (8) David Fausett describes how the final
European 'discovery' of that much-anticipated great southern
landmass we now call Australia killed off, by default, an entire
historical legacy of imaginative and speculative literature and art. For
in the end (the end of all those centuries of exploration), the
'discovery' of that greatest of southern islands sunk all
those rafts and flotillas of imaginary mythology that had proved such
rich flotation devices for moral and ethical speculation. What Fausett
has defined as the "austral theme" had been spawned through
the interrelationship of geographical discovery and literature, and can
be traced from Ancient Greece in a number of meandering trails that
encompass the adventures of Marco Polo through to Renaissance sojourns
in the 'far East,' and include accounts of Portuguese
explorations beyond the Spice Islands and secretive Dutch journeys south
of the equator. It was a theme that provided rich ground for
experimenting with ideas of identity and otherness, for trialling
belief-systems and assumptions, and for speculating about the value of
the prevailing ideas and perceptions of the time.

But as Fausett notes, once the rich source of imagery suggested by
the imaginary realm of terra australis incognita had run aground against
the tangible data of geospatial empirical evidence, "utopian
writing in its original (geospatial) sense" (9) foundered as the
value of empirical knowledge gained epistemological precedence. Fausett
describes how the allegories spawned by the "austral theme"
had been forged from a fruitful interaction between mythical and
empirical knowledge. But as commercial expansion continued to surge
forward into what had previously been territories of the imagination
alone, the role of mythical knowledge gradually came to be associated
with "the dogma and chicanery with which state and church connived
to prop up the remnants of feudal society." (10) Empirical
knowledge, on the other hand, came to be associated with challenges to
the old order.

However, there is more than one way of keeping control of
geospatial territories as well as the territories of the imagination.
And it may well be that the detritus of the order we find ourselves
standing amidst today is the residue of values established on unfailing
belief in the benefits of rationality and all things quantifiable.
Strangely, the will to myth and allegory continues even during times
when the value of such methodologies is held in disrepute. And as sites
for the imagination, islands survive as fertile beds in which to plant
seeds for new myths and allegories, ones which draw sustenance from
bodies of 'rational' knowledge that have grown from such
pursuits as socio-political enquiry, history or environmental
understanding. It may well be that the kind of critical, self-reflexive
utopian writing whose demise was lamented by Fausett is in fact
undergoing a process of regeneration into a myriad of expressions from
the very shorelines of the islands where the genre was thought to have
expired.

Artists

--Miles Hall

Much of Miles Hall's work is centred on the material
substances from which paintings are constructed-the paint itself; its
viscosity and the way it drips and runs and smears; or the surfaces on
which that paint is smeared-the way in which canvas or board or
aluminium holds and clings onto the paint. The forms and marks and
fields of colour laid onto these surfaces often act as records of the
motions and actions that produced them-of dipping, smearing or
spreading.

They are, more often than not, very self-consciously beautiful
works-works that celebrate the way in which art can exist within a more
or less separate aesthetic realm, one where the references in the work
are directed back to the history and 'pedigree' of art itself.
There is, therefore, a strong sense that the work of this artist draws
deeply from a modernist tradition in which art is, by and large, about
art itself. Given this aesthetic orientation, it may seem odd that such
an artist would seek inspiration in a place like Peel Island.

The series of drawings he produced there are no less formalist or
modernist in motivation than his work produced in the studio
environment, and yet a more prolonged scrutiny of the subtle, sensuous
surfaces the artist creates not only bears evidence of what appealed to
him there, but also suggests ways in which these drawings are evidence
of explorations of a kind of visual emancipation within an enforced
containment.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The drawings Miles produced from his residency have silky skeins of
graphite rubbed over and into the thick porous paper. These surfaces
have then been erased back into, and etched by fine, sharp lines. The
images are responses to the water and the horizon; there is evidence of
the verticals of trees and scratchy bushland, and of passages of light
reflecting off water; for although the forms are abstracted, a strong
sense of landscape remains. There are details of the undergrowth running
along the bottom of some of the picture planes, yet at other times these
references to aspects of landscape operate as a play of marks and
gestures contained by the geometric space defined by the edge of the
drawing. There's a feeling of chance in these works-an intimation
that has been kept by the self-consciously random nature of the marks,
and there is an overall appeal that comes from the implication that the
image has arisen into being without too much effort.

Even in the most apparently formal of Miles' descriptions of
his work there is evidence of another kind of empathy-an urge to think
through the material and formal qualities of the work into a more
internal understanding of how those who came before him on the island
might also have found ways of interpreting their time and place.

--Natasha Cordasic

One of the videos Natasha Cordasic produced for her residency
depicts a still grove of fir trees. The filtering process through which
the image has been screened transforms the colours into an unearthly
psychedelia, and the trunks of the trees appear to crawl with pixels as
the light flickers through the leaf canopy. The accompanying soundscape
emerges as a kind of parallel universe, complete with the familiar
noises of everyday insects-the drone of a 'mozzie' increases
to a maddening pitch until you are overwhelmed by the need to slap it,
and then disappears. A cicada trills; a cricket chirps, and then a crow
calls. Within the ring of the grove a figure seems to be performing an
arcane ritual. It is not clear what is happening-the figure dissolves
into the circle of trees and then re-emerges distinct from them. It is
as if there is a kind of gathering taking place. Slowly it becomes
apparent that things are being harvested from the trees-simple, straight
shapes--objects oddly out of place amidst the organic shapes of the
grove.

(FIGURE 2 OMITTED)

And it also becomes apparent that the figure is that of a woman. It
is a shaky, hesitant observation. The shapes are tenuous. The sounds of
the bush seem to come from a place that is timeless in comparison to the
actions of the ritual. Although it is not fully apparent in the video,
the objects that are being incongruously harvested from the trees are
fluorescent tubes. Yet despite the difficulty in determining their
identity, the incongruity of their presence in the bush lends a
whimsical, poignant aspect to the video--the implied futility of having
sowed and then reaped fruits that are incommensurable with their
context.

In another video made by Natasha she performs a simple everyday
ritual in the interior of the former Catholic Church on the island. The
scene opens on an almost monochromatic still-life--an enamel bowl and a
huge, chipped jug on a wash-stand; the clarity of slanted light falls
and flickers onto the vertical striations of veejays behind. The
arrangement is as timeless as a Delft still-life and resembles the
original set-up of the rooms in the white compound of the lazaret. There
are very few props for this ritual--an apple and a small bouquet of
weeds that has been gathered from the grounds that surround the church.

A young woman appears. She pours water into the bowl from the heavy
jug and washes her face in the water to which these ingredients have
been added. The act is a purifying one--a moment of intimacy that we
watch as outsiders. The light dances across the vertical boards. The
shadows are soft. From time to time the crisp clarity of the sounds
outside perforates the stillness inside as occasional insects swoop in
and then retreat. She dries her face with a towel. The act is over.

What are we to make of this simple video? When I ask Natasha what
motivated her to create such works there--in that time--she is hesitant.
However, it is as if in that room, in that simple act, it may yet be
possible to thread together a whole range of relationships and overlays
and interpretations that might lead us forward into the future.

--Jennie Jackson

When I ask Jennie the question about what motivated the work she
produced on Peel, she replies that she is interested in "making the
invisible visible"-she notes that she is, in part, producing
imagined landscapes as much as she is describing aspects of what she
experienced there.

She talks about how the dual responses of attraction and repulsion
identified in Peter Ludlow's Peel Island: Paradise or Prison?
continue into the present. Jennie describes the bushland that surrounds
the fringes of the settlement and continues through to the centre as
having a kind of monotony-much of which derives from an undergrowth that
has evolved since the banning of the regular controlled burnings that
were part of indigenous land management in this country. Without it the
diversity of coastal forest dwindles and, as current non-indigenous
management programs are focused on protecting what remains of the
lazaret buildings, a dilemma is set up--how to manage the vegetation of
the island while maintaining its cultural heritage?

(FIGURE 3 OMITTED)

Jennie's photographically manipulated images have been taken
from the forest edges just beyond the settlement and the graveyard.
Using the photographic technique of splicing, she focuses on individual
aspects of those spaces and duplicates them. The result is the sensation
that architectonic forms are being manifested from within the riotous
organic growth. It is as if steeples and archways and tentative
monuments have formed themselves through intertwined branches and
patterns of light without any human industry. Jennie speaks of 'a
presence' in the landscape. "You do have a sense of the
spirits of people who might have lived there ... a sense you are in a
place with a history, and that it's not necessarily a happy
history. In that sense it's like a ghost town."

The architectonic forms that appear in Jennie's photographs
seem captured in a state of emergence--it is as if the bush is
renegotiating terms for the places it is currently in the process of
destroying. Jennie describes how the bush has reclaimed many of the old
lazaret buildings; large trees have grown through collapsed buildings
and termites have almost completely destroyed most of the buildings that
had not already been demolished. When the lazaret was closed, most of
the buildings were dismantled and the timbers stacked in piles waiting
collection by the demolisher who would take them to the mainland.
However, it is said that the unlucky salvager lost his boat in the first
trip, and as a consequence the stacks of timber are still standing
awaiting removal, each part marked with Roman numerals as a guide for
their reconstruction on the mainland. Many timbers are now little more
than frail painted surfaces, the inner wood reduced to dust by termites.
They exist as insubstantial ghosts; fragile exoskeletons of things that
still seem to be awaiting another life on the mainland.

--Dacchi Dang

Dacchi Dang first arrived in Australia as an asylum seeker from
Vietnam in November 1982. He escaped from Vietnam by boat and arrived in
Malaysia in March 1982 where he spent time in an internment camp waiting
to be granted refugee status. After nine months' internment he was
accepted into Australia as a refugee and became a citizen in 1984.

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Dacchi speaks with wonder about the fact that so few of the
patients tried to escape from Peel, especially given the fact that
Stradbroke Island and the mainland are so visible from the shorelines.
He recalls how no land was visible from the island of Pulau Bidong,
where he was interned, and surmises that if it had been, people would
have set off in droves by whatever means they could. He talks about his
feelings of isolation, desperation and despair on Pulau Bidong, and
wonders how much longer he could have borne the weight of such feelings.
He wonders also about the lifetime of such emotions that must have been
harboured by so many of the patients on Peel.

Dacchi works in a number of media, but on his second trip back to
Peel he chose a pinhole camera with which to make his images. With
pinhole cameras, images are produced by a very simple process: the image
does not pass through a series of lenses, resulting in a reduced depth
of field compared with a more tightly focused camera. Because the
pinhole lacks the rapid fire-shutter speeds of more sophisticated
cameras, the images produced are blurred and soft--there is a dreamy
feeling to them that Dacchi feels was particularly appropriate for
recording his images on Peel. There is a simplicity and immediacy to the
technique that is also appealing to this artist, which he explains in a
lyrical way--the simplicity of the image often seems to convey an
immediacy that seems less reconstructed than that of other forms of
photography and, partly because of this, the dreamlike quality of the
images can have a veracity that is unnerving.

Dacchi's pinhole images are of the huts in the men's and
women's compounds and the landscape around these areas. The ghostly
quality of some of these works is suggestive of other presences beyond
the material--or perhaps of the potential of particular materials to
evoke a range of associations.

Dacchi is hoping that his next trip to the island will involve
turning one of the 10' x 12' x 12' huts into a huge
pinhole camera that will capture the view beyond. The dimensions of the
huts are almost a perfect scaled-up version of Dacchi's own
pinhole. He estimates the exposure time at somewhere between five and
ten minutes, and says that, like the patients in those huts, the process
will be about waiting time. There is something peculiarly evocative
about converting one of these huts into its own recording device;
transforming it into a simple invention for capturing the same scene
it's looked out on for so many seasons. It's rather like
giving the hut a kind of agency through which to speak; like giving the
very walls the power to write or to create their own imagery.

--Moe Louanjli

Moe applied to take up the Peel Island residency five weeks after
his arrival from Paris, where he had been studying at the Sorbonne and
the ENSBA. Originally from Casablanca, Morocco, Moe has lived most of
his life in Paris but had also spent some years in Perth, where he
continued his education.

Moe's art practice has utilised a number of media. He is
interested in different ways of mapping, and also in the way in which
dreams of utopia can affect such undertakings as urban planning. So, the
lazaret was interesting as a kind of dystopian model. During his time
there Moe produced a large number of photographic images, each of which
bear traces of the ways in which the inhabitants of the island
interacted with the environment. Several material aspects of life on the
island emerge as important to this documentation.

One of these is concrete. This is the subject of one of Moe's
images that has been taken from inside one of the huts reserved for
indigenous inmates at floor level, revealing a concrete floor that lies
broken up and destroyed. Tendrils of vegetation are pushing their way
through the cracks, and the dark doorway frames the simple form of
another indigenous hut beyond. Moe describes the long-term struggle that
had to be undertaken before the indigenous inmates were given the rights
to have concrete in their vestigial dwellings. He calls upon historical
evidence that details the bare earth of the flooring of accommodation in
which four inmates were expected to dwell at a time. This series also
details the corrugated iron of which the huts were constructed, and the
artist talks about how these materials bear evidence of power and
struggle; the metal huts of the indigenous dwellings made for infinitely
more severe experiences of weather than did the wooden buildings of the
white patients and the workers.

[FIGURE 5 OMITTED]

Many of Moe's images focus on the deterioration of
surfaces-the rust on enamel pots and implements, the highly textured
bark of a tree, the pitting on metal implements, and the patina on an
abandoned cicada shell. He speaks of the settlement as a place where
everything is falling apart-the buildings, the implements, the history,
the memories. He speaks also of the slow deterioration of the human body
as the effects of Hansen's Disease gradually took hold.

English is the third language in which Moe is proficient, and it is
perhaps partly for this reason that he finds such interest in the ways
in which things are described in the historical accounts of Peel Island.
There is evidence enough of ironies in such language. He is interested
in the fact that the historical literature refers to "the
patients," who seem in fact to be treated more like inmates. He is
also interested in the battle for including "kitchenettes" in
each of the women's huts--a term that seems so feminised and
dainty--the battle for which had been started by the infamous Rose
Donovan who "was always misbehaving." The success of this
struggle meant that the women were able to--and from then on were
expected to--eat on their own; in the end, perhaps a kind of Pyrrhic
victory in a place where isolation was so profound. Moe's interest
in such contradictions is seen when his images are exhibited as series;
the relationships between the individual works suggest the tension that
exists between the will to exist and perform as an individual and the
drive to be part of humanity as a whole.

--Eric Rossi

Eric describes his experience on the island as generating responses
in him that he found surprising. He has produced a three-screen video in
response to his residency on Peel--three image-sets that seem very
unrelated at first sight. One features two shots of huts on Peel--one of
corrugated iron for indigenous patients, and one of the wooden huts
built for white patients. On another screen he has photographed the
surface of a block of evaporating dry ice, and the third screen features
images of a helicopter. Eric describes how so much of his work has
focused on memory and gravity, and when asked about the relationship
between these three images, he talks about disappearing knowledge,
dissipating energies, and the struggle of ideas and memories to become
airborne. There is no direct connection between these images, but the
stark white-on-black of the dry ice cube melting into air is a
metaphorical reminder of transience. The helicopter images, on the other
hand, are reminders of the effort and energy it takes to get man-made
inventions off the ground. Flanked by these images of movement through
and into air, the stillness of the huts seems all the more suffocating.
Eric talks about the poetic associations of the word
'gravity'--the gravity of the situation in this place, and
literally of its leaden pull. He talks of the importance memory must
have played for those who were incarcerated on Peel--of how it would
have served as an imaginary lifeline that could join them to the wider
world from which they had been unwillingly extracted.

[FIGURE 6 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 7 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 8 OMITTED]

His own experience, by contrast, is remembered as one of strong
camaraderie with the other artists. He speaks of feeling a sense of
privilege at the opportunity to spend time there in such a unique
situation. Eric's own boyhood was spent around the Bay,
"mucking around in boats"--he has held a boating license since
he was 15. He talks about the thrill of crossing the Southport bar when
he was really young, standing at the wheel of his father's boat,
and he tells of how many of the local kids around Runaway Bay had their
own tinnies, and how they'd use them to explore the environment at
Horseshoe Bay, a reserve where it was possible to come across such
wonders as turtle bones, live starfish and full scallops at low tide.
Some of Eric's strongest recollections of his time spent on Peel
were of the meals the students shared; memories of shared meals and
conversations run strong among those artists who have participated in
the residencies. A particular piquancy is granted by the fact that such
occasions are set amidst the almost tangible memories of other
histories; histories that act as a reminder of the penalty of being
forcibly removed from the community one has been a part of.

--Teone Reinthal

Since attending the residency on Peel Island, Teone has produced
five experimental short film responses to Peel. Their titles are The
Tzaraath, Shadows and Refractions, Four Tribes, Aquarium and Cut Glass
(Aquarium 2).

[FIGURE 9 OMITTED]

Of these, Aquarium emerges as the most highly personal account.
Although most of the images and historical references pertain to Peel,
it is simultaneously a document about the artist's personal
experiences and an investigation of the ways in which these experiences
overlap with material documenting the emotional encounters of some of
the patients of Peel.

She describes how creative enquiry led her to experiment with ideas
of 'narrative collaboration' involving her own personal
experiences intertwined with accounts derived from Peter Ludlow's
book Paradise or Prison, and subsequent readings from the Riddel report
and other anecdotal accounts. One of her most memorable impressions came
from one woman's account of a deep and profound feeling of calm
that came over her after being diagnosed with Hansen's Disease and
arriving on Peel Island. She described the feeling as a tremendous
relief at her own worldly obliteration, her retirement from the
expectations and pressures of society.

Teone has predominantly worked as a filmmaker producing
government-sponsored documentaries about indigenous communities, work
that has required a matter-of-fact observational approach. This was the
approach she used when she first undertook the residency on Peel but
later on, as she was reviewing the footage she had accumulated, she was
struck by the links between her images of a multitude of decaying
surfaces and "our furiously human obsession to eradicate all signs
of warts, infection, mould, decay." She adapted this more poetic
approach to her subject matter in the film The Tzaraath. She explains
the title as relating to a disease detailed in both Jewish writings (the
Tanach) and biblical sources (Leviticus, chapters 13-14) that afflicts
the skin in a way similar to leprosy. In each of these sources the
affliction is associated with retribution for sin, and its influence is
also described as extending to the material habitation of the victims.

For Teone, the continuities between these biblical descriptions and
the rotting, decaying, corroded surfaces of so many parts of the island
seemed profound, and her brief film with the Hebrew title focuses on the
entire island as a microcosm of affliction.

Teone describes how the sound tracks for her films are integral;
the music for Shadows and Refractions, titled The Lazaret, was composed
in situ by her partner Steve Reinthal and recorded direct to camera. The
music for Aquarium, titled Lorelei of Moreton, was composed and recorded
by Teone and alludes to the whispered songs of sorrow from hundreds of
voices she imagines as having "drifted out on the tides and
sea-mists, from deep inside the huts and the sheds on Peel ... songs of
yearning from the broken hearts of people deprived of touch, of
affection, of love."

When I ask Teone why she has chosen the title Aquarium for this
work, she explains that, historically, Peel Island was a holding tank,
an experimental observation station for the socially dangerous-it had
been used successively as a quarantine station, an asylum for
inebriates, and as a leprosarium. To this artist, the connected question
as to whether she--or the audience for her work--identifies as either
occupant or observer is one that hangs in the balance.

--Jim Waller

At first glance, the paintings of Jim Waller seem to fall neatly
within the traditional genre of figures in the landscape. However, a
longer look reveals a kind of disjuncture at play--there is a sense of
pastiche, where shards of observation and memory and data have been
collaged together along with random facts to make some kind of
contingent reality. This artist draws from the traditions of his
practice in order to hold them up for closer scrutiny, as if to question
the veracity of historical assumptions about the genre itself. This kind
of self-doubt sets the work to one side of the typical modernist
approach, and the deeply sceptical nature of this artist's work is
evident in the way in which highly traditional representations are
reconfigured in new ways.

[FIGURE 10 OMITTED]

As with so many of the artists on this residency, Jim notes how the
interaction with other participants triggered new ideas that often
jostled with received ideas within their respective major research
areas. In Jim's case, his meeting with Dacchi Dang was instrumental
in offering a first-hand experience of the kinds of cultural
disjunctions that are part of our daily understanding of place in
Australia.

Jim estimates that during the residency he took approximately 900
'happy snaps' and made dozens of pen drawings--plenty of
resource material from which to develop new work. He describes how these
drawings already reveal a sense of hybrid environments--how the cleared
lawns in the centre of the lazaret are surrounded by the unkempt
character of the original environment that is gradually encroaching. He
describes the site as having "a weird kind of
out-of-placeness" about it--perhaps an evocation of that
'weird melancholy' that early colonial landscape artists
identified as being associated with the Australian landscape. Jim does
not see this space as an aspect of 'a living history.' Rather,
he describes it as a history that has fallen into decay--with bits that
have been lost, or broken or discontinued. And yet in his paintings
disjuncture and discontinuity are the very subject of his work. It is as
though the polyglot discontinuities of our contemporary experiences are
used to re-form the picture-planes of a shared world-view that may have
grown from the very will towards forgetting.

--Rikizo Nishina

When he arrived on Peel Island Rikizo found himself being drawn to
the strong, flickering patterns of light and shade that filtered through
the Australian vegetation. He was drawn to the fact that this light and
patterning was so very different to that which he had experienced in
Japan. Also, he was made more aware of the use of lighting in Japanese
dwellings compared with those in Australia. In traditional Japanese
houses, the use of shoji screens creates a diffused light that is then
reflected off the simple tatami floor coverings; in general, the darker
ceilings and lighter-coloured flooring is the reverse of home decor in
Australia. Drawing inspiration from the celebrated essay on Japanese
domestic aesthetics, In Praise of Shadows, by Jun'ichiro Tanizaki,
(11) Rikizo began a series of work that drew from his experience on Peel
and extended that experience to his observations of other aspects of the
Australian landscape during his residency here.

[FIGURE 11 OMITTED]

Central to this body of work is a slow-moving video where forms of
trees slowly emerge and then seem to evaporate, as if in a mist or
perhaps a dream. The moving images of trees were taken from the veranda
of one of the residences at night through a simple animation process
that articulates single shots frame by frame. Rikizo used a torch to
'draw with light' on the landscape while the shutter of the
camera was open, and the result is a tonally reduced field that seems to
be drawn more by hand than produced by technology. It appears like a
forest of ghosts; a place where solid forms drift and melt into air,
only to reappear in later passages.

Rikizo describes the first time he went to the island as feeling
that it was like a paradisical place--he was aware of the intense
colours of the sea and the sky, of the bird-calls that laced in and out
of the fabric of quietness. However, he says, during his second visit he
became aware of a more sinister feeling. By that time he had become more
aware of the island's history, and he describes an inexplicable
sensation that came across him during his walks around the island and
also at night, while he was engrossed in the lengthy process of
photographing a stand of trees frame by frame.

However, there is no hint of any particular details of the history
of the island in Rikizo's work. Rather, there is a sense in which
the ambience of the place has been screened through his aesthetic
sensibility and rendered in a poetic way in which it is possible to read
the traces of two cultural influences. In these works, it's as if
the artist's experience of place and memory has been translated
into a formally beautiful minimalism that alludes to, rather than
describes, the sense of place from which it arose.

(1) "The significance of the island derives from its historic,
social and aesthetic values, as well as the integrity of its natural
environment." T Blake and R Riddel, The Leper Shall Dwell Alone:
Peel Island Lazaret Conservation Plan (Brisbane: Department of
Environment and Heritage, 1993), 38.

(2) Peel Island operated as a quarantine station (1874-1906) and
inebriates' home (1910-16). Ibid., 35.

(3) "Beautiful one day, perfect the next" is a slogan
developed by the Queensland Tourist and Travel Corporation.

(7) "The Peel Island lazaret is significant as the only intact
example in Australia of a lazaret designed on the principle of
isolation, and also the only surviving former multi-racial lazaret in
Australia." Blake and Riddel, The Leper Shall Dwell Alone, 29.

(8) D Fausett, Writing the New World: Imaginary Voyages and Utopias
of the Great Southern Land (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1993).

Pat Hoffie is a visual artist based in Brisbane. For some time her
work has focused on issues of Human Rights, and her series Fully
Exploited Labour was the focus of a survey exhibition held at the
University of Queensland Museum in February 2006, to coincide with a
monograph on this series. Her installation titled Maribyrnong-no place
to weep was included in the 2006 Museum of Contemporary Art,
Sydney's biennial survey exhibition titled Interesting Times. She
has worked on a number of residencies in the Asia-Pacific region, and
continues to work with artists and arts communities there. Professor
Hoffie is also a writer who makes regular contributions to visual arts
journals; she is the Queensland editor of Artlink magazine and has
played active roles in the arts sector. She is currently a member of
Viscopy and Asialink, and was a board member of NAVA, the Australia
Council for the Arts, and is a past President of the Institute of Modern
Art. She is currently Director of the research centre SECAP (Sustainable
Environment and Culture, Asia-Pacific) at Queensland College of Art and
is Griffith University's UNESCO Orbicom Chair in Communications.

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